ACM Bytecast Maria Klawe - Episode 10 Transcription
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ACM Bytecast Maria Klawe - Episode 10 Transcription Rashmi: This is ACM ByteCast, a podcast series from the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest educational and scientific computing society. We talk to researchers, practitioners, and innovators who are at the intersection of computing research and practice. They share their experiences, the lessons they've learned and their own visions for the future of computing. Rashmi: With 14 years, as the president of the prestigious Harvey Mudd College, our next guest knows a thing or two about engineering. Maria Klawe has spent her career as a mathematician, computer scientist, teacher, administrator, and a vocal supporter of equity in academia and the tech industry. It is rumored that she knows every student on campus by name. She's the recipient of numerous awards, and also has 17 honorary doctorates. Maria, welcome to ACM ByteCast. Maria Klawe: Thank you so much Rashmi. Rashmi: I'd love to start with the question that I ask all my guests. If you could please introduce yourself and talk about what you currently do as well as give us some insight into what really drew you into this field of work. Maria Klawe: I'd be happy to do that. So my name is Maria Klawe, as Rashmi said, I'm in my 15th year as president of Harvey Mudd College, which is a small science and engineering college in Southern California, one of the Claremont Colleges. And before that, I was Dean of engineering at Princeton. And before that I was Dean of science at the University of British Columbia. And I had several positions at the university of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Before that I worked for IBM Research in San Jose. And before that I was at the University of Toronto. So I've spent my career basically, mostly in academia and mostly in academic leadership positions. But also what's quite a lot of interaction with industry, having been at IBM Research for eight years, and then also having been on the boards of Microsoft and Broadcom. And I'm currently on the board of startup called Glowforge. Maria Klawe: So the first thing I should say, and we'll probably come back to this, is I actually intended to be a mathematician from my career. I grew up loving Math and Math was not a thing that girls were supposed to be good at at that time. And I think that's where my passion for equity, diversity, inclusion and equity in all STEM fields stem from, because everyone at that point would say to me, "I don't see what you want to be a mathematician." Even though they knew I was really good at Mathematics. But they would say, "There are no great female mathematicians. You're Page 1 ACM Bytecast Maria Klawe - Episode 10 Transcription so good at lots of other things. Why don't you do something else?" And I happened to be extremely stubborn as are both of my children, I will just say. And so the easiest way to get me to do anything is tell me not to do it. So of course I stuck with Mathematics and I ended up getting my PhD in Mathematics Maria Klawe: At the time. Both of my parents were academics. My mother was an economist and my father was a cartographer and I had always loved teaching and I love doing research. And I just assumed that I would be a professor in, started as an assistant professor at some university somewhere. And I did know that there were lots of people on the job market, in the field of pure mathematics. And I knew that there were not a lot of positions, but of course I assumed that didn't really apply to me. And sure enough, I got a tenure track position at a University of Michigan, about 25 miles North of Detroit called Oakland University. And moved there and was really stunned to discover that I didn't like being there. So it was mostly a social thing. I was single and I had one date in the entire time I was there and with somebody I didn't like. I mean, there was just no social [inaudible 00:04:01] whatsoever. Maria Klawe: And I was teaching student multi-variable calculus and linear programming, things like that to students who literally could not add fractions. And this is not a description of Oakland University today. Let me say it's come a long way from those days. But there had been some issues. Then they changed their admission standards and all of a sudden the students were not very strong. And so one of the ways I coped with being there was to spend a lot of time at conferences. And I just discovered through that, that there were people that were doing the kind of Mathematics that I had moved to do when I went to Oakland, which was discrete Mathematics, who actually were in Computer Science Departments and that the job market was crazy. And so as a result, I decided I would get a second PhD in Computer Science. And that would mean that I could be a faculty member at, for example, a Canadian University or a top university someplace else. Maria Klawe: And I've spent my career at the interface of Mathematics and Computer Science, and I feel incredibly lucky to have had that opportunity. I've been heavily involved in professional societies and research institutes and so on, on the Math side, but also on the Computer Science side. And I think one of the things that became very obvious to me in the 1980s is that the number of women in Computer Science were dropping and there weren't the same kinds of activities that they're ready were in Mathematics, just to encourage women in Mathematics. So I just sort of, it was obvious to me that I need to start a number of organizations to try and encourage more women to enter and stay in Computer Science. So I was talking to a student with whom I'm currently working with on discrete Mathematics. Maria Klawe: Page 2 ACM Bytecast Maria Klawe - Episode 10 Transcription And we're loving doing it, and it's just being incredibly productive. And he said, "I just can't understand since you love doing Math so much, why you went into administration." And I said, "It's because I want to change the world. And it's much easier to affect change when you're actually in a leadership role." And I think one of the important places to affect change isn't academia because academia affects the pipeline. I mean, if we don't graduate more women in Computer Science, it's very hard to really increase the numbers of women in the tech industry. But I've also been involved in the tech industry and trying to move things there. So I would say I love both Math and Computer Science. I still love research and teaching. And I love being an administrative leader because it allows me to be more impactful in terms of creating change. Rashmi: Thank you for that introduction. And for that history, it really sort of adds color to the decisions that you've made and the path that you've taken. I'd like to go back to the point where, I mean, when you had a very strong motivation to leave the Math world that you had created for yourself because clearly your social life was being impacted tremendously. But when you entered the Computer Science world, whether it was to choose, I know you were, you were pursuing a PhD in Computer Science when you found a position that clearly the jobs were there, but did you find that that transition from Math to CS was fairly seamless and the number of women there I'm guessing was still very low. You didn't have a whole lot of role models, I'm guessing, to look at and say, "Okay, I want to be like that person." Maria Klawe: So the first thing I'll say is it definitely wasn't seamless. I entered graduate studies in Computer Science at the University of Toronto taking five graduate courses per semester, never having written a line of code or taken a course in Computer Science. And of course for the theoretical Computer Science courses, that wasn't a problem because I have had a very strong background in Mathematics. But I was taking things like compilers and operating systems and all of this programming language, all of these kinds of things where I had absolutely no background. And so the first three weeks or so, I didn't have a clue what was going on in any of my courses, other than the theory ones. But I just was determined. And I literally worked seven days a week, from 7:00 AM, till midnight, every single day. I did nothing but work. And by the time I was sort of four weeks in, I was starting to understand things pretty well. Maria Klawe: And I got pretty much straight A's in all of the courses I took. And by the time I... And I was also teaching introductory Computer Science. I think I didn't start teaching until my second semester, but I started teaching introductory Computer Science. And within... By February, I was getting invitations to apply for Computer Science faculty positions in Canada.